Computer users are accustomed to using a mouse and keyboard as a way of interacting with a personal computer. While personal computers provide a number of advantages over written documents, most users continue to perform certain functions using printed paper. Some of these functions include reading and annotating written documents. In the case of annotations, the printed document assumes a greater significance because of the annotations placed on it by the user. One of the difficulties, however, with having a printed document with annotations is the later need to have the annotations entered back into the electronic form of the document. This requires the original user or another user to wade through the annotations and enter them into a personal computer. In some cases, a user will scan in the annotations and the original text, thereby creating a new document. These multiple steps make the interaction between the printed document and the electronic version of the document difficult to handle on a repeated basis. Further, scanned-in images are frequently non-modifiable. There may be no way to separate the annotations from the original text. This makes using the annotations difficult. Accordingly, an improved way of handling annotations is needed.
Users are accustomed to writing on both blank paper and paper with preexisting content. For annotations from each of these surfaces to be represented electronically, one needs to determine the location of the pen for these different environments.
Digital pens that use cameras to determine their location typically capture a block of integrated information to retrieve the position of the pen relative to a positionally encoded medium or any other information embedded in the positionally encoded medium. Here, camera-captured images may or may not contain an image of the pen tip.
Therefore, when local metadata, which is associated with a particular region of the positionally encoded medium, is introduced, the problem becomes more difficult to address. FIG. 11 shows a local metadata region and enlarged region. As FIG. 11 shows, when assigning local metadata to a region, in some cases, the region is enlarged and local metadata is embedded into it, so that one can retrieve the local metadata when writing in the original region and holding a digital pen in any pose (i.e., independent of pen rotation and angle). A typical margin size is 7 mm.
FIG. 12 shows a form with some conterminous fields. FIG. 12 shows an example of a potential conflict associated with a conventional local-metadata-embedding method. The overlapped area shows conflicts caused by two local metadata values being embedded in the same area.
Some solutions for trying to resolve the conflicts associated with conterminous local-metadata regions, as FIG. 13 shows, are based on avoiding conterminous fields, which means all fields with local metadata should be separated. Therefore, the available design layout options are limited when creating forms and large amounts of space get wasted. This kind of solution is not efficient.
FIG. 13 shows fields that are separated to avoid local metadata conflict.